My current work reflects a fascination with the mysterious structures and events of the natural world and the uncertainties of life science research. I am interested in the idea that for all of our efforts to safely categorize and compartmentalize information, we are ultimately faced with a reality that we can never completely grasp. My working process reflects this as it involves continually moving, cropping, and abutting shapes on the page. I recombine discreet shapes from previous works, altering contexts to create new imagery using both accidental and determinate approaches. Individual forms in a piece are graphic and clearly delineated as if they possess some necessary function, but this quality is foiled as the reading of the overall image remains unfixed. I see these hybrid forms as assertive yet hapless, caught up in incomplete or shifting narratives beyond their control.

My work stems from a range of sources including scientific illustration and cartoons. The work echoes mutation, evolution, repulsion, attraction, familiarity, strangeness, deterioration, and the potential for new existence. But it is as much about my own visual language as it is a depiction of enigmatic organic processes.

Over many years I’ve worked with an extensive range of traditional techniques to create prints, including intaglio, relief and screen printing. Within these processes I have taken advantage of the inherent seriality, multiplicity and the ability to record changes through state proofing. Recently I have further embraced these print-language characteristics through the use of the computer. My current series of prints have evolved and emerged from re-contextualizing, morphing, grafting and repurposing shapes from a sort of accumulated database or taxonomy of personal iconography. These shapes are stored in hundreds of digital files. I embrace evident parallels to natural selection- a shape existing quite comfortably in one print image may be inserted in another, this time with different dimensions or with an exaggeration of a previously negligible, seemingly useless feature. In one print a protrusion reads as a tail – in another the same form becomes a proboscis. Like an irresponsible or naïve scientist, I gaze at the computer screen as if scanning a mysterious medical imaging platform or through a microscope, testing hypotheses, putting experiments into motion, as I resolutely supply a random occurrence into a seemingly established order.

I intend the images resulting from this process to signal the conceptual and technical means with which they have been brought into being. The viewer is intentionally cued that these are a variation and recombination of an existing alphabet or vocabulary of forms. The images function like instructional “blue-prints”, experiential maps or depictions of implied, yet flexible narratives.